Thank you for raising this, I think I was too quick here in at least implicitly suggesting that this defence would work in all cases. I definitely agree with you that we have some desires that are about the future, and that it would misdescribe our desires to conceive all of them to be about present causal antecedents.
I think a more modest claim I might be able to defend would be something like:
The justification of everyday actions does not require an appeal to preferences with the property that, epistemically, we ought to be clueless about their content.
For example, consider the action of not wandering blindly into the road. I concede that some ways of justifying this action may involve preferences about whose contents we ought to be clueless—perhaps the preference to still be alive in 40 years is such a preference (though I don’t think this is obvious, cf. “dodge the bullet” above). However, I claim there would also be preferences, sufficient for justification, that don’t suffer from this cluelessness problem, even though they may be about the future—perhaps the preference to still be alive tomorrow, or to meet my friend tonight, or to give a lecture next week.
Thank you for raising this, I think I was too quick here in at least implicitly suggesting that this defence would work in all cases. I definitely agree with you that we have some desires that are about the future, and that it would misdescribe our desires to conceive all of them to be about present causal antecedents.
I think a more modest claim I might be able to defend would be something like:
The justification of everyday actions does not require an appeal to preferences with the property that, epistemically, we ought to be clueless about their content.
For example, consider the action of not wandering blindly into the road. I concede that some ways of justifying this action may involve preferences about whose contents we ought to be clueless—perhaps the preference to still be alive in 40 years is such a preference (though I don’t think this is obvious, cf. “dodge the bullet” above). However, I claim there would also be preferences, sufficient for justification, that don’t suffer from this cluelessness problem, even though they may be about the future—perhaps the preference to still be alive tomorrow, or to meet my friend tonight, or to give a lecture next week.